About me
Originally this blog was about my student exchange to Montreal and North America (and later, south and cental america). This was the 'chaos land' of the title. However, once overseas I soon realised that Australia (and especially Sydney) was the real chaos land, -I would monitor Australian news with increasing feelings of trepidation, in reaction to all the huge and worrying political changes Australia is going through, eg industrial relations laws. So this blog is dedicated to trying to understand the chaos of this world, to find its beauty, and to direct its energy to something good and life affirming.
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As part of today's "Project Democracy" training, I just did a fictional press conference as the secretary of the Harmonia chapter of NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), speaking for a bill on environmental justice, that would require polluting chemical companies in minority communities to clean up their act.
This was my script (that I wrote).- I have used US spelling.
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"This bill has been a long time coming, and is overdue in Harmonia.
"We all have a right to a clean healthy lifestyle.
"Chemical polluters are industry dinosaurs that should have cleaned up their act decades ago.
"Minority populations have long had to bear the burden of harmful toxic pollution in our communities. We have seen leukemia and other cancers take its toll on our citizens.
"This is a commonsense initiative that will help lift us out of these disadvantages.
"Mr. Coburn and I will now field questions."
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It was a pretty good press conference, (with good ad lib responses to questions) in contrast to the horrendous group process that preceded it. The two guys (one of whom was lying on the floor) refused to discuss our group focus for more than two minutes- they were impatient and always complaining. They just wanted to delegate immediately.
Hence a conflict arose- because I was adamant that we had to discuss it. This is because about two months ago in a Sydney Uni government class, my group had delegated tasks prematurely, before a vision had been agreed upon- with terribly disempowering, uncreative consequences- and I had resolved in my class journal to not repeat this.
There was immense tension in the group- it was interesting that it was very strong gender tension- with both I and Christina, females who have no older brothers, whereas the other two males were threatened by our leadership and continued to speak over us. The third woman was younger- 17 years old, quiet and obviously had a domineering older brother.
posted by: anneinchaosland at 02:01 |
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